February 2009
60 posts
My insistence on calling Hipster Runoff HO
Stands.
January 2009
42 posts
Shorter version of rant below:
No, of course people shouldn’t judge you for what you like. But hell yes they should judge you for what you say! Let’s not throw out the fistfight with the taste-water.
Like something I said to Carl Wilson a while back about my “obvious contempt” (I believe for Panda Bear’s hypothetical audience!!): Contempt is like a gun; am I dismantling it to disarm, or just...
RIFF MARKET: RE HIPSTER RUNOFF'S ANIMAL COLLECTIVE... →
perpetua:
A very long and interesting post in which Nick Sylvester critiques Hipster Runoff and the site’s recent post about the Animal Collective. Very smart, but also slightly odd for me because (to varying degrees) I personally know just about everyone he’s talking about except for Carles, a person who for the longest time I assumed was Nick Sylvester.
The thing is, though, that I still...
Radosh.net: Breaking: Clique Girlz Are Breaking →
I casually read via teenpop news site Tommy2 that the Clique Girlz, nee Clique, who have unthinkably risen to some kinda second-tier teenpop position in Radio Disneyland (I haven’t been paying attention), are losing a member. I did not, as I am wont not to (not wont to?), do any research on it, but Daniel Radosh did. It’s…um, complicated. And a little weird.
Slumdog Millionaire Child Actors Still Live in... →
This is why I tend to care a lot more about the actual production machinations of the film industry and don’t concentrate as much on the biz angle of music. The music industry just isn’t capable of demonstrable injustices of this scope. Using “on location shooting” as an excuse to pay shamefully low wages to workers is extremely common — in this case, at least the...
Ashlee Simpson-Wentz is a voice of sanity in a... →
maura:
for real.
And, of course, staying sane in a mildly insane [EDIT: and, arguably, randomly cruel] world has kind of been her M.O. since album one! It’s one of the things I like about her music, too, though not for the sort of line-in-the-sand stuff she’s doing here (wherein the world is more insane that it is on her albums). Her persona is distinctively ambivalent in a...
Stephie Wander - St. Louis Blues, from the...
Oh snap!
Obama: “Some of the House Republicans may not be as familiar with the actual contents of the bill as I would like…”
Social status is not a material thing. →
Chris Weingarten is my favorite music writer on the internets today with his funny takedown of a song that gets more annoying the more I listen to it (in an attempt to get some contrarian social stat action via hating on it by saying it doesn’t even deserve the attention I’m giving it etc.) and a funnier takedown of an album that I haven’t heard and never will, because I heard...
Stop Trying to Win Ben Stein's Money! It Is... →
h/t Naked Capitalism via Atrios
Katy Perry: Clearing the Air on Her Faith, Her... →
For anyone interested in Katy Perry’s Christian-rock (and, more broadly, Christian culture) background, check out this article that should definitively show that I was right when I said that the only people Katy Perry was really trying to piss off with “I Kissed a Girl” were socially conservative Christians. Which is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. That are already dead....
Two Proclamations
maura:
- Billy Joel is not that bad, although he does have a lot of awful songs. There’s definitely a “diminishing returns” thing going on. (And I’m gonna pull some hometown rank and declare that my opinion on this counts more than anyone else’s from Long Island, save maybe people who graduated from my high school the year before I did.)
- The word “hipster,” when used by white information...
Me on a Scrabulous game that is now being finished...
“we can finish this one, even though it’s like blagojevich level taint”
I can only imagine the meeting with the lawyers…
“You need to make substantial changes to avoid a major lawsuit.”
“I know! We can make the ‘T’ worth two points!”
“Problem solved!”
Actually, the 8 letters instead of 7 thing somehow destroys the...
I erroneously-erroneously, rather than...
Obama's First 100 Hours →
Having done chores and general financial/domestic maintenance all day, I can attest to the fact that this sort of tidying up is immensely satisfying. I told someone that this week has felt kind of like having someone finally turn off the faucet after your bathroom’s been flooding for about a decade. Not the hardest part of the job by any means, but you do sort of breath a sigh of momentary...
“There is a generation of eighties semiotics students who wish that Barnes had...”
– Logic of Excess
Sasha Frere-Jones’ piece on of Montreal in The New Yorker is relentlessly on point, and strongly recommended, particularly if you’re the type of person who is not yet sold on the brilliance of Kevin Barnes. I’m especially glad that SFJ made this point: “After a dozen listens,...
Obama Claus
It’ll be nice to wake up tomorrow morning and read about all of the executive orders etc. that Obama overturned while I was sleeping.
33 things you never knew had names. →
tomewing:
maura:
OCTOTHORPE - The symbol ‘#’ on a telephone handset. Bell Labs’ engineer Don Macpherson created the word in the 1960s by combining octo-, as in eight, with the name of one of his favourite athletes, 1912 Olympic decathlon champion Jim Thorpe.
(via nervousacid / linkfilter)
B-b-but it has a name and the name is “the hash key”.
POUND! THE POUND KEY! Gah, how many minutes...
Art in the Age of Not Having Much to Say
Saw Ben-ya-meen Button the other night. It was curious. Actually, it wasn’t curious at all. It was BORING. Probably the worst film I saw in a theater this year, if only for the sheer volume of terrible ideas on display. Let’s recount a few (many a spoiler ahead):
1. No one seems to really care that much that Benjamin is AGING BACKWARDS. I mean, you’d think it’d be kind of...
Stephie Wander - All About the Lurve Agin
Love...
Bush has been semi-officially out of office for...
…AND I HAVE YET TO SEE ANY SUBSTANTIAL POSITIVE CHANGE IN MY PERSONAL WELL-BEING.
In fact, in two hours I don’t think anything has changed. Not my clothes, my appearance, even my general level of hunger, exhaustion, or sense of purpose.
I am disappointed. I didn’t expect immediate change, and it’s not like I set a timer to it or something, but by now at least I...
1 tag
Oh hey, that kind of explains it.
It is exquisitely-honed artifice, like a Koons sculpture
via ILM re: Animal Collective — a ha! Treading the murky waters between taste-thing, i.e. not really my (taste-)thing, and idea-thing, i.e. hating hating HATING shit that’s coyly, ambiguously supposed to Mean Something But Not Really I Guess. MUMBLECOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No,...
Pop Thots
Coming off of a weird airbrushing convo I stumbled through at Offnotesnotes, posted on an interesting but only tangentially related Poptimists post here.
“The will > ability”
I still think this is a slightly different beast than what you were tackling, though. I feel like the “symbol standing in for the event” was by and large addressing a kind of rejection impulse...
An experiment
maura:
justaskin: hey
justaskin: how do i get digged
mauradotcom: pander to lizard-brained 16-year-olds
justaskin: lol
mauradotcom: no, i’m not kidding.
just thinking about downloading music and this whole thing about how all the music is being done illegally in the internet or whatvr and its like how do they even kno this anyway becuz its not like you can actually find people when...
Kiss Me Thru the Phone...until I see you in like...
OK, my main beef with the otherwise amazing and totally sophisticated (ahem) “Kiss Me Thru the Phone” by Soulja Boy and Sammie is that the song isn’t actually about a long-distance relationship — it’s about some dude who can’t get home until later and is telling his girlfriend to chill out a bit until he gets back. In the video, Soulja Boy and Sammie are playing...
In which the second half of "Say You Will" becomes... →
Very nice article from Tom about Robots. But he didn’t mention Margaret Berger’s “Robot Song,” which is pretty much the greatest song of all time. I’ll upload it whenever it is they let me; for now you just have to enjoy Rhiannon.
Rhiannon f. Acorn - Emergency Room
If this is my...
And anyway...
Who can complain about a show that prominently features Whose Line’s Greg Proops as one half of an ultra-gay fashionista duo (best I can tell from the 30-second iTunes clip I caught, Greg is the boss and the other guy is the receptionist, which suggests that everyone who works there is either (1) gay or (2) Keke Palmer)?
EDIT: pilot episode is here.
Holy jeez, even Tumblr's template examples are...
Tourist: Could you give us directions to Olive Garden?
New Yorker: No, but I could give you directions to an actual Italian restaurant.
NM
what the fuck are you talking about? animal collective is fucking amazing and beats the shit out of most “acclaimed” music
Should be “acclaimed ‘music’” for full effect, really.
On Tumblr, you can steal other people's ideas AND...
How do I figure out who reblogged this thing?
barthel:
i bit the bullet and listened to a stream of the animal collective album - it’s EVEN WORSE than i thought it would be. not only do i loathe this with every fibre of my being, i can’t hear what anyone would like about it at all. the flattened-out production, whereby everything sounds as if it’s been mixed at the same level, makes me feel...
“Oh yeah, GUY-dork quit his job nearly a month ago but can still pay rent in a...”
– Me, re: mumblecore. It was a good one, but y’all missed it because I LOCKED IT on LIVEJOURNAL, which you cannot do on Tumblr. Whatever. Post on MUMBLECORE, and why I am using it to stand in for any art that I happen to vehemently dislike nowadays, not to follow because it’s not even...